Boundaries

A while back I got a ticket in the mail for failing to stop at a red light. This New England girl had been caught on camera doing a “California rolling stop.” I was mortified, and upset at the steep fine. My husband was remarkably cool. Apparently he had noticed my tendency to roll through intersections and had been worried about it. “I’m just glad nobody got hurt,” he said. That made me feel even worse. You’d think I would learn my lesson, but I continued to tap-and-roll through intersections more often than not. So this week I recruited my children to help me “brake” my habit. They were...

If you read my last blog, you know that I am battling resistance. Today it has taken on many forms, from errands to housework to the season finale of “Smash.” And now it has gelled into writer’s block. I have several ideas, each of which has some merit, but none of which takes me past the opening sentence. I type. Backspace. Type. Backspace. My stomach is all bunched up, and I feel trapped. But at least I am in the chair, fingers on keys, right? According to Steven Pressfield, that is what it is to be a pro. The professional goes to work every day, whether or not she feels...

If you’re like me, you have a To Do list — whether the high-tech version on your smart phone or the low-tech kind written on a Post-It, or perhaps just maintained in your head. But do you have a Stop Doing list? Maybe you should. I got this idea from Jim Collin’s illuminating book, Good to Great — Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Part of what makes good companies great is not being overly diversified. The great companies he studied pursued a single “Hedgehog Concept” (being the best at one thing rather than being an also-ran at a...

When my pals and I were in our twenties, I don’t remember worrying much about finding balance in our lives. We worked hard, played hard, stayed up late and damn the consequences. But now as a mid-career professionals, many of us with children, I find we are all talking about it, and I also hear it from my clients. We know that imbalance is inherently unstable and unsustainable, but it can be hard to envision a different way. So what is balance, and how can we achieve it? Stand on one foot and you’ll see that balance is not static. You wobble and waver. Even if you manage to stand...

Lately, my husband and I have been playing a game of chicken. It goes like this: Both of us say that we want to go to bed earlier, but then as evening progresses, we each keep on working and wait for the other to blink first. Finally when it is well past our target time, one of us turns off the computer and heads upstairs and the other follows. Result? If anything, our bedtime has actually gotten later over the past month, even though we have started getting up earlier (FIVE AM!) to go to the gym. So what gives? Part of the explanation is epitomized by Jerry Seinfeld”s Night Guy/Day...

I hereby declare my first No-Tech Sunday a success! After hemming and hawing, resisting and justifying … I did it. Saturday night I sent my last email and made a Facebook post (about going offline, of course!), and turned off the laptop. So that I wouldn’t forget, I stuck a Post-It on the lid announcing “NO TECH SUNDAY :)” And that was it until Monday morning. Yes, I felt the urge to check, but I held firm.* On my quest to re-condition my responses (see previous post), I achieved the following positive reinforcement of my behavior: Nipped several escalating conflicts in the bud...